Are they really elite?
No:
Elitism sometimes seems predicated on being branded with the proper degrees. But when universities embrace a therapeutic curriculum and politically correct indoctrination, how can a costly university degree guarantee knowledge or inductive thinking?
Is elitism defined by an array of brilliant and proven theories?
Not really. University-sired identity politics has not led to racial and ethnic harmony.
Is there free speech or diversity of thought on campuses? Did progressive government save the inner cities? Are elites at least better-spoken and more knowledgeable than the rest of us?
Long before Trump’s monotonous repetition of “tremendous” and “great,” Barack Obama thought “corpsmen” was pronounced “corpse-men,” and that Austrians spoke “Austrian” rather than German.
Not long ago, Representative Hank Johnson (D., Ga.) warned that if Guam became too populated it might just tip over and sink.
They’re just credentialed. Elite people are actually educated, knowledgable and competent.
Elite people are actually…
Elite is not a specific quality. It is a bucket phrase for any qualities you wish to consider. The main thing is to distinguish between elite and non.
Elite politicians aren’t so because of merit. They are so because they are able to marginalize those not in their club.
Elite politicians aren’t so because of merit. They are so because they are able to marginalize those not in their club.
I agree. It’s not elite in terms of competence or ability, it’s elite in terms of power. And most such elite stratification is an attempt to hold on to power after the fact with marginalization of those not in power a natural and obvious step because it inhibits potential rivals.
My favorite example is the time, several years ago now, when an asteroid was making a particularly close approach to the earth, and someone, I forget now if it was a reporter or possibly a congresswoman, asked if that could possibly be caused by global warming!
There are some really competent, educated, smart elites. Think of Silicon Valley. Then there are others who gain entrance to The Tribe via credentials.
The problem is that once the competent, educated, smart folks start thinking of themselves as Being One with the credentialed idiots, they start excluding competent smart people who aren’t credentialed, and the country starts to look the way it does today: run by credentialed idiots who have contempt for everyone not in The Tribe.
“Austrians spoke “Austrian” rather than German.”
Actually, the people in Germany also think Austrians speak a different language.
People as far south as Slovenia can pretty much understand my “German” learned from my grandma from Vojvodina (the “j” is a “y” sound). In Austria, people correct my grammar. In Germany, people just look at me funny.
That odd German accent that “Ah-nold” has? No one sounds that way in Germany. Everyone has that accent speaking English in Austria. It’s really hard to keep a straight face.
It could be ah tooma?
We’re dealing with two things that combined over the last couple generations.
There’s the post WW2 explosion in aptitude testing that began channelling the vast majority of bright kids into college.
And there’s the rise of the lib-prog politically correct college monoculture, starting I’d say in the sixties, since become dominant.
Previously, bright people with a huge variety of socializations were scattered randomly all through society. Tough on an IQ 130 ditch-digger, perhaps, but good for society.
Now, a large majority of bright people automatically get herded into and socialized by the lib-prog college monoculture, to the point where they’ve become a distinct social class.
Alas, current lib-prog college monoculture instills the everyday common sense of a ferret with dementia.
And the rest of us – including a lot of very bright people who *don’t* subscribe to the PC monoculture – have gotten tired of being told how to live our lives by our self-appointed betters, when they routinely demonstrate their pig-ignorance about how the world actually works.
Interesting times.
All of which may explain the Fermi paradox.
Every society needs defense against takeover by unrelenting but otherwise-incompetent rent-seekers.
Blaming the Fermi paradox on such is an immensely depressing thought. It implies that the parasites winning is a universal constant, rather than a correctable local anomaly.
Mind, it might well be so. But it’s a depressing thought.
Which is why I live my life being happy to be wrong… and I’m so good at it!
I’ve been doing interviews for the past few years – some for entry level technical positions – and finding myself wondering, “What does a college degree actually guarantee?”
If I buy a car or a loaf of bread, I have certain expectations about what I’m getting. This expectation can be enforced. If I buy a dozen eggs from Safeway, take it home and it’s an empty carton, I have been defrauded.
What does paying 120k and giving 4 years of your life guarantee? The degree say something like, “Some set of guys has conferred a degree on this guy.” If I’m someone looking at that, what should it tell me about the holder? I can’t think of anything.
It’s historically the case that someone with a degree learned something but that’s simply not true anymore.
If I were hiring someone and it was important that they could add fractions, I would not assume that was the case because they had a BA or even a BS. It would be foolish not to quiz them.
The only thing people are paying for when they get a degree is the privilege of a second look through the recruiters screen. If the recruiters started filtering a different way tomorrow, the degree would be mean nothing.
It’s historically the case that someone with a degree learned something but that’s simply not true anymore.
Colleges are great at teaching things; it’s just that those things are not always what a person needs to plug and play into the corporate world. That is probably the hardest part because the job market is so diverse. How many people even end up working in fields they went to school for?
My background is in the military where a variety of elite forces are found. For example, the US Army has paratroopers, Rangers, Green Berets, Delta, and other special mission outfits. The Air Force has their Pararescue personnel, combat controllers, and other special operations forces. The Navy’s most famous elite are the SEALS but they also have other special operations units. The entire Marine Corps considers itself an elite force but they also have Force Recon.
The point is that all of these units have an extremely tough selection process, followed by extremely high standards to stay in the units. Failure to meet these standards means termination and these people put their lives on the line doing jobs that ordinary military personnel just can’t do. The self-proclaimed “elites” in the government, once they gain admission, almost never face any consequences for failure. Once they’re in the Old Boys’ Club, they’re set. Many, if not most, of them come from Ivy League backgrounds where admission is difficult (unless you have the right connections) but grade inflation means few will fail. They’re credentialed but not broadly educated.
Why, you’d almost think a more accurate term for our political-media “elite” might be the old Soviet “nomenklatura”, the incestuously self-perpetuating circle of well-connected Party members and their offspring who automatically went to the head of the line for all the good jobs.
Now who would benefit from such a system?
How dare we question them!
I’m an elitist by way of Nock and Mencken. And neither of them would consider today’s so-called “elite” any clique they would want to belong to.